Wednesday, April 06, 2016

The High Court gave a very important judgment yesterday (Independent.ie story) on the issues raised by the use of a search warrant to seize an entire email account where many of the emails in the account were not caught by the terms of the warrant. To grossly simplify a complicated decision, Barrett J. held that where the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) had seized an entire email account it was not itself entitled to carry out a "sifting" exercise to determine which emails fell within the scope of the warrant - instead, this had to be done by some impartial vetting process. In the lack of a suitable statutory mechanism, this could be done by agreement between the parties.

The full decision isn't yet on the courts.ie site, but courtesy of the CCPC I've uploaded a scanned copy to Scribd.
The full decision will need careful consideration, but at first glance it's a very privacy protective decision which may have far reaching consequences in other areas of criminal procedure. Notably, it cites with approval the 2013 Canadian Supreme Court decision in R. v. Vu on the special privacy issues presented by searches of computers. (And, I'm glad to see, the Digital Rights Ireland litigation.) By requiring specificity in what is seized and how that material is then examined, it puts a question mark over other search powers - such as those under s.48 of the Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act, 2001 - which are generally used so as to seize an entire computer and not merely specific records.